I am about to start working on the redesign of the blog of the company I work for and I wonder whether it’s a good idea to make it a single page app. It’s an ordinary blog with nothing specific to tell about it. So far the arguments for making it SPA are better page load time and no need to refresh the whole page when moving from article to article. The argument against is a probable SEO disaster. I have never done single page apps before (except some funnels) and the statements above are just my assumptions based on what I read on the web. I tried to find a working blog made as SPA in the internet, but surprisingly with no success. My major question as the title says is what are pros and cons of a blog operating as a SPA? Are there any such blogs around? I would really appreciate the links
Another choice I have to make is to develop frontend as a WordPress theme or to use WP only as backend (with WP REST API) and create a separate frontend on NodeJS. The obvious disadvantage of the latter option is inability of using a big part of WP plugins. The advantage is a backend-agnostic frontend. Can somebody with experience of using WP as backend only tell if it’s worth it?
Thanks
As you said SPA’s are a real pain for SEO there are ways around it but they take some setup. The benefit is that you don’t have to reload the page but in a blog you generally spend a long time on a page and one of the big reasons for having one is SEO. So unless you are a huge blogging company it probably isn’t worth the benefit.
I have seen several sites which do some cool stuff with blogs which are SPA’ish’. For example, right now LinkedIn pulse loads a post and as you scroll down it loads a new post at the bottom and changes the url. See: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-ace-top-50-interview-questions-dr-travis-bradberry
As for the WP approach I have looked at using the WP REST API but we found as we looked through it that you probably would only want to use it for displaying the blog and stick with the full WP admin area for editing the blog. The main reason being that by the time you take away the admin side you don’t really get much from WP and you might as well use something less complex. This might be what you are saying anyway but just wanted to be clear. I would still only do this if you don’t like theming WP but WP isn’t bad to theme around and you can find plenty of people who know how theme it.